But I don’t care how reasonable it is: After a full hour of it, the nastiness gets old. Moore is the same guy who consistently turned audience sympathy on its ear with the many human and robot creeps who populated his mid-‘00s masterpiece Battlestar Galactica.Īs for major players, Jamie’s stubborn sister Jenny is a livelier member of the extended Clan MacKenzie family than most, and actor Laura Donnelly makes it seem like the character’s every insult and outrage was thoroughly thought through before she opened her mouth to unleash them-when she gets nasty, it’s for a reason. It’s hard to fathom that showrunner Ronald D. When you’re a writer, there are no rules-stock characters are only stock characters if you write them that way. On the latter score, the lout who beats his son until Claire and Jamie intervene exists for no other purpose than to be the guy who beats his son until Claire and Jamie intervene the subplot is therefore neither enlightening nor entertaining. We’re a dozen episodes deep into the show now, and it has yet to produce a three-dimensional antagonist for our heroes, either in major or minor form. The rest of “Lallybroch,” tonight’s episode, just makes you groan. This week the visual love letter extended into the show proper, with sweeping aerial views of Jaime and Claire Fraser riding over the green hills, sumptuous interior shots of their china-blue bedroom, and a set piece at a water mill powered by a stream so clear that its cool water could give you goosebumps right there on your sofa. In its unique moving title cards, which spotlight a different microsection of Scotland every week-a murmuration of starlings wheeling above a loch, say, or a hand loading gorgeous old guns for a duel, or a big ol’ dog curled up in front of a roaring fire in a well-appointed sitting room-the filmmakers’ obvious affection for the Highlands and its homes all but radiates from the screen.
In Outlander’s case I wish it were true, because it’d be the most interesting character on the show. It’s a cliché to say the setting of your series is a character in and of itself.